Beyond
the Board Meeting: Improving School Coverage

November 2006

Video recordings of sessions at "Beyond the
Board Meeting: Improving Your Education Coverage," a one-day
workshop on covering schools, are now posted on the World Wide
Web. The conference was for Kentucky reporters and editors,
but presenters discussed various education-coverage principles,
ideas and issues that could be useful to education reporters
in any state.

The workshop was presented Nov. 14 in Frankfort
by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community
Issues, in cooperation with the Kentucky Press
Association and the Prichard Committee for
Academic Excellence. Click
here for opening remarks from Al Cross, director of the
Institute, and Robert Sexton, executive director of the Prichard
Committee.

Kentucky’s testing system and
response to No Child Left Behind: The federal No
Child Left Behind Act has created conflict and confusion in
a state that already had a high-stakes testing system. The state
and federal systems are explained by Rhonda Sims, director of
assessment support for the Kentucky Department of Education,
and Lisa Gross, interim associate commissioner of the department's
communications office. http://128.163.47.14/nov/3-CATS_and_KY.mpg

The changing federal impact on local
schools: Alan Richard, communications director
for the Southern Regional Education Board and
former rural-education reporter for Education Week,
talks about the problems faced by rural schools, especially
the requirements of No Child Left Behind, and how to translate
those issues into stories that your readers will want to read.
Perhaps no other journalist in America has a better grasp of
how these issues relate to rural schools. He, Lisa and Rhonda
also answered questions about testing and accountability. http://128.163.47.14/nov/4-The_Chaning.mpg

Governance: Who calls what shots at
the local level? Though it has been 16 years since
the Kentucky Education Reform Act took effect, local school
boards and school councils -- the decision-making entities created
by KERA -- are still sorting out their respective roles. Susan
Perkins Weston, a coach for school councils, helps journalists
understand who's supposed to do what and whom to call first.
http://128.163.47.14/nov/5-Governance.mpg

How to find, organize, analyze and
present education data:Perhaps the greatest challenge
of education reporting today is the use of data -- test scores,
dropout rates and so on. To help understand what information
is available, how to access it, how to understand it and how
to translate it into readable stories, hear from Lisa Gross;
Linda Johnson, computer-assisted reporting coordinator at the
Lexington Herald-Leader; and Michael Childress,
executive director of the Kentucky Long-Term Policy
Research Center. The moderator is Michael Jennings,
former education reporter for The Courier-Journal.
http://128.163.47.14/nov/6-Panel_Discussion.mpg

Sources, tips and putting ideas to
work in your newsroom: To help put all this knowledge
into action, Brad Hughes of the Kentucky School Boards
Association, a former reporter in the Bowling Green
area, offers a comprehensive set of sources and tips for gathering
information. Brad and Al Cross, director of the Institute for
Rural Journalism and Community Issues and former political writer
for The Courier-Journal, direct a roundtable discussion with
journalists. http://128.163.47.14/nov/7-Sources_and_tips.mpg

If
you have comments or suggestions about these or future presentations,
please don't hesitate to contact us by
sending an e-mail to al.cross@uky.edu.

The
Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues helps
non-metropolitan media define the public agenda in their communities,
through strong reporting and commentary on local issues and
on broader issues that have local impact. Its initial focus
area is Central Appalachia, but as an arm of the University
of Kentucky it has a statewide mission, and it has national
scope. It has academic collaborators at Appalachian State University,
East Tennessee State University, Eastern Kentucky University,
Georgia College and State University, Indiana University, Indiana
University of Pennsylvania, Marshall University, Middle Tennessee
State University, Ohio University, Southeast Missouri State
University, the University of Illinois, the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of Tennessee-Knoxville,
Washington and Lee University, West Virginia University and
the Knight Community Journalism Fellows Program at the University
of Alabama. It is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation and the University of Kentucky, with additional financial
support from the Ford Foundation. To get notices of
Rural Blog postings and other Institute news, click
here.